Computer science

Over 350 million people worldwide suffer from depression. A key part in diagnosing depression is screening questionnaires, which rely on patient self-reports of the recent past. With the advent of social media and wearable devices, there is an opportunity for a novel approach to detecting when a patient diagnosed with chronic depression becomes acute. In this project, we use social media data and physical activity data to detect depression acuity. Social media is indicative of an individual’s mental state. Physical activity is an indicator of physical wellness.

Investigating geographical footprints of income shifting by multinational enterprises. PwC owns a large data set across all industries in Canada from its tax consulting engagements and annual standard tax filings from clients. This growing data source is an opportunity for accurate tax benchmarking, trend analysis and gaining deeper insights by transforming them into market differentiating knowledge that can be dynamically shared and accessed by multiple teams.

Every year, people suffer the consequences natural disasters descend upon them. When these unfortunate events occur, emergency response teams are deployed and need to deal with a multitude of challenges. In this scenario, the communication infrastructure is a key element that can contribute to the success of the mission. Considering the case of a Drone-Aided Mobile Ad-Hoc Network (DA-MANET), where devices such as drones and cell phones are available, it is imperative to investigate how their interaction must occur in a way to optimize the humanitarian mission.

The project consist of developing a novel interface to control a fleet of quadcopters in an emergency situation. The interactive system will have to interpret the user intent in such a way that minimum cognitive resources are required. Humanitas products target non experts in robotics whom need to maximize their concentration on medical support and logistic, thus they require an intuitive and not monopolizing control interface. It will also be required that feedback information can be sent to the user without using the visual feedback of their application control screen.

The objective of this project is to develop an analytics platform that will give us an understanding of sensory data in predicting trends and relationships between sales and wine sensory data. The wine sensory data we will use in this project is entered by reviewers and consumers rating various attributes such as Aroma, Appearance and Flavor during wine tasting. The Wine Sales data is gathered by the BC liquor board.

Pests and diseases are major problem that growers face with plants. Ecoation Innovative Solutions Inc. (EIS) is proposing a solution to this problem that turns to plants as reliable source of information about their own health and well-being. EIS will provide data from different sensory measurements for clean and infested plants. We intend to use recent advances in machine learning to build a model that automatically diagnose the plants from these measurements. The intern will work on developing the model and adapting it for different crops and cultivating environments.

People are social creatures and interacting with others is a fundamental human behavior. As people spend more time online, a larger part of their social life also become online. Online Forums such as Reddit have become very popular because of this. In this project, we want to define the what health means with regards to online forums - is it the quality of the comment, the average length of the comments, frequency of posts, number of users, the language of the posts or a combination of these. We also hope to determine which factors can affect the health of an online forum.

Currently, the camera in your smartphone can take 2D color pictures. We have developed a new type of camera that can also provide you with depth at each point, not just color. Having depth and where objects are relative to each other in the scene open the door to many different new possibilities, for example having your phone tracking and recognizing your gestures, measuring distances between objects in pictures, changing the lighting, or removing and replacing the background in your photos. Another possibility is refocusing pictures after they were taken, or removing blur.

This project involves researching and integrating constraints into existing route and schedule optimization software. The partner organization (Western Heritage) has developed software that calculates the shortest route and optimal daily schedule for home care workers visiting patients in their homes. These schedules must consider constraints for each worker and patient, such as: smoker, pet in the house, lifting requirements, gender requirements, etc. as well as constraints for multiple starting points for each worker.

Recent technological advancements have led to widespread usage of interactive and collaborative systems in educational settings. In particular, SMART Technologies interactive products are being widely used at schools and universities across the country. Although this is a valuable achievement, it also presents new challenges to evolve these systems to new user needs. For example, one of the main challenges of the teachers using SMART systems in classrooms is the need to go back in time and review missed meeting or class material.